DHAKA: Pussy Riot band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova declared a hunger strike on Monday to protest at death threats and what she described as conditions of slave labour at her Russian prison camp.

In a letter released to the media, she painted a harrowing picture of the Gulag-style conditions at the penal labour colony No. 14 in Mordovia, where female inmates are forced to work 16 to 17 hours a day, sleep four hours and endure repeated abuse.

The 23-year-old mother, who is serving a two-year sentence for staging a performance against president Vladimir Putin in a Moscow cathedral, said she would refuse food and stop her work at a sewing workshop until she is transferred to another prison camp.
Tolokonnikova declared her hunger strike after she said she had received a death threat from the camp’s deputy head whom she named as ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Kupriyanov’ and who she said was a self-confessed Stalinist, reports The Straits Times.

BDST: 2015 HRS, SEPT 23, 2013
RoR/Jck